The Air War (65 page)

Of course, Aarmon’s thunderous glower might have contributed to their reticence, she decided. For most of their way through the camp she could not work out what the man was up to. Only as
they were practically at the general’s tent did she guess at it: their branch of the Engineers was both new and different, in a society that was suspicious of the first quality and outright
hostile towards the second. A division of mind-linked soldiers using experimental machinery and taking on such an unprecedented selection of recruits would already have gathered many enemies back
home, for no other reason than just how very new and how very different they were. Faced with that, Aarmon would have had two options: he could work to minimize the outward show, bow his head, hope
to be overlooked, or he could look his detractors in the eye and dare them.
And no prizes for guessing which way he’s jumped.

The welcoming committee within the tent was also some way from Imperial standard. General Tynan, nothing more than a bald and ageing Wasp with a fancy rank badge to Pingge’s eyes, stood
with proper military decorum in the centre of the tent’s interior, an easel beside him with maps tacked on and annotated. Beside him, though, an elegant Spider-kinden woman reclined on a
couch, attended by a couple of Fly-kinden men, while there were two more Spiders, both men and well armoured, right behind her. On the general’s other side were a pair of colonels, a thin one
with the badge of the Engineers and a stockier one that she already knew as Cherten of Army Intelligence.

‘Major Aarmon.’ Tynan received Aarmon’s pinpoint salute, even as his eyes flicked over the aviators’ delegation. He nodded slightly, and Pingge saw the Spider woman smile
a little in acknowledgement of the newcomers’ bravado.
But, of course, the Spiders have women soldiers, more of them than the men, and they’ve been marching with the Second for
tendays. This is probably the most receptive audience Aarmon’s likely to get.

‘Your people are winning a lot of credit for the Engineers, I understand,’ Tynan observed, ‘both for your machines and your training. You’ve made quite an impact. On the
enemy as well, I’m sure.’ It was not a joke and nobody smiled. ‘I’m aware that you’re not a standard army detachment.’ His eyes made brief reference to the
Fly-kinden and Neshaana. ‘If you’ve come here to fight that battle, then take it elsewhere. I don’t care. I have a city to capture, and the composition of your force is of no
importance to me, so long as you do your job.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Aarmon, stiff-backed and outmanoeuvred.

‘What you need to know is that there have been developments back home regarding the engineers and your resources.’

‘Sir?’

Pingge could almost sense the words passing swiftly between Aarmon and Scain and Neshaana, and the other pilots back at the impromptu airfield.

‘Colonel Mittoc?’ Tynan prompted his underling.

‘Hm.’ the skinny engineer nodded rapidly, ‘General Lien has finally decided to trust us with a consignment of your fuel. It arrived yesterday, for my personal supervision. All
very secret, not to let the enemy get hold of, and so on.’ His annoyance at being kept in ignorance was plain on his face. ‘However, it’s here now, which means no more long hauls
to Capitas for you. As of now you’re operating from wherever the Second camp, and it’s only a hop from here to Collegium, I’m sure. You understand what this means?’

‘Yes, sir. Endgame,’ Aarmon said coolly.

‘Well put, Major.’ Tynan took over. ‘We will be engaging the ground forces of the Collegiates shortly, and then the battle will move to the walls. Your mission now is twofold:
you are to continue your attacks on the city, but you must also target their air power wherever possible, as an absolute priority. And when we begin to take down their walls you must screen the
army, and especially the artillery, from air attack. I leave the specifics to you, but the elimination of the enemy air power is paramount. At any cost, you understand?’

There was a second’s pause before Aarmon replied, ‘I do, sir.’ Pingge did not have to be a part of the pilots’ communion to understand.
This is it then. This is when
they throw us into the fire.
And she thought of the skill and determination of the Collegiate airmen, and wondered how many people she knew would be dead within a tenday.

This time, when Averic returned to his meagre lodgings, after a day’s drilling with the Student Company and still wearing his purple sash, the lock on his door had simply
been smashed.

Thieves
, he thought first, but in his heart of hearts he knew otherwise. He had been trying to forget the Wasp woman who had come with her brown-dyed face, and told him he was a traitor,
and he had been all along. She had marched away with the army, after all, and the episode had taken on a dreamlike quality, for of course he was
not
a traitor, not to anyone.

Yet he had spent his day drilling with Collegiates who fully intended to kill as many Wasp-kinden as they could, should the fight draw this close and, if he were to subject his position to the
philosophical rigour beloved of the academics, he would have to confess that he was surely betraying
someone
. It was just that, so long as he attached his loyalties to the nearest available
target, he could pretend that he was unshakably honourable and honest. These were qualities he had always assumed that he possessed, but now he was forcibly reminded that apparently it had all been
an act.

Not the woman waiting for him, this time, of course, but a man: a Beetle with burn-scarring about his face. He sat on Averic’s bed, wearing the hardwearing patchwork canvas of a tramp
artificer, cleaning his nails with a knife and grinning at the Wasp youth standing in the doorway.

‘Come on in, why don’t you,’ he suggested.

Averic directed a palm towards him wordlessly, but his lack of resolution must have shown very plainly in his face, for the man’s grin never faltered.

‘Very nice, always the posing. Now get over here and take your orders, boy. Stop pissing about.’

By accent, the stranger could have passed for a Collegiate.

‘You’re Army Intelligence?’ Averic asked, in a small voice.

‘Right in one. Expecting some sly Rekef bastard, I’ll bet. We’re ahead of them on this one, and you should be grateful. Rather deal with us than with them, I’ll bet. Sit
down here beside me, youngster.’ He patted the bed with his free hand.

Averic shuddered, unable even to identify the emotions fighting within him, and then he slouched forward and sat down, feeling obscenely like a prostitute before a client. When the man put a
heavy arm about his shoulders, he yelped and tried to spring up. The Beetle was strong, though, and the knife was close.

‘I hear you’re deep cover,’ the Beetle gave a smirk that gave onto a world of insinuation. ‘Listen, boy, it’s all going to come down any day now. We all do our
part, the city gets its Imperial governor, and it’s commendations all round. This is Intelligence’s big chance, before the Rekef boys try to foul things for us. We all pull together, we
Imperials.’

‘You’re no Imperial,’ Averic whispered. It was the accent: it was simply too genuine.

‘Clever lad. I was in the Empire for almost ten years before coming back here. You Wasps, you know how to run things, and how to look after your own. Flap-mouthed gutbags that run this
place – would you trust any one of them? Do you really think they know the first thing about how to make a city go? Piss on them. Sick of this place when I left, I was, and twice as sick of
it now I’m back. But that’s fine, because it’s going to be my sort of place any day now. And yours, too. I’ve my eyes on a lieutenancy, and I reckon you could scrape
sergeant out of this. Could even stay in the College, if there’s still enough of it left, and if we let them teach still.’ Horribly, inappropriately, he hugged Averic to him.
‘Now, boy, our work is all about targets, foci of resistance. The people here will fight – surprised me with that, they have – but we cut off a few heads and they’ll fall
apart. No chain of command, see.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ Averic asked dully.

‘Cut throats, boy. Burn them. Stick them with a sword. Dead leaders make poor tacticians, as we say. And, as you’re here on the inside, you’re going to be perfectly placed to
catch them off guard. Sure, the Big Men around here, they’re out of your range, but you’re well placed for some College Masters who won’t be suspicious about a student turning up
for a little extracurricular, eh?’ The Beetle chuckled throatily. ‘See here, here’s your homework, boy.’ He thrust a tattered scroll at Averic.

Averic stared numbly at the list, a meagre handful of Collegiate names, all they would trust him with, set against the grander tapestry of men and women the Empire wanted dead. Treachery seemed
to be welling up inside him.
So I was an agent all this time
, he found himself thinking sadly. The Empress expected, apparently, and even at this distance her awful might seemed to weigh on
him more than the Beetle’s arm. He tried to picture his parents, to review their parting words, parse them for some hint that this had been their plan all along.

He found that he could barely bring their likenesses to mind.

He saw the names of four lecturers who had taught him, three of whom had plainly resented doing so.
Oh how I’ll make them twitch when they find out I’m no victim to be slighted.
How I shall get even with them.
But there was no fire in that thought. He could not muster the bitterness. Instead he foresaw the acts involved: saw himself stepping through a sequence of
patient murders with the same focused attention he had applied to all of his College work. The burned man was right. For all their sneers and insults, they would never expect him to come after
them.

He felt full of a venom that had corrupted him without him knowing. Reaching the end of the list, he closed his eyes.

‘Bold and swift and bloody,’ came the voice of the Beetle-kinden. ‘Say it.’

‘Bold and swift and bloody,’ Averic echoed. He was holding himself deliberately still, because otherwise he would be shaking. He had read to the end of the names, the last addition
seeming almost like an afterthought.

The bed lurched as the man stood up suddenly. ‘When the army breaks the wall, surrender to the first soldiers you see, ask to be brought to Colonel Cherten for debriefing. They’ll
spot you for one of their own. I’ll have a tougher job, believe me. We won’t meet again before then.’ He clapped Averic on the shoulder, startling the youth into opening his eyes,
staring up into the man’s own gaze with a determination tempered like steel.

‘Good boy,’ the Beetle said, approving, and then he was at the doorway. ‘Good luck.’ And he was gone.

Still sitting in that dingy, wretched room, Averic stared after him, only now allowing himself to start to shake.
Traitor, I’m a traitor after all this time.
Any doubt had fled him,
leaving only a terrible emptiness in its wake. He was going to betray them all.

Eujen Leadswell
, was the last name on the list, surely only added after the Student Company had been formed.

In a small study, almost lost in the upper storeys of the Amphiophos, far from the main bustle of governance, Jodry Drillen stared at the desk before him.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘Nothing’s changed,’ Stenwold told him. ‘If we agreed before, we agree now. It’s necessary.’

‘I didn’t have
this
in front of me before,’ Jodry whispered. The room was ill lit, neglected, more a storeroom for unwanted records than a place for scholars or
Assemblers. ‘Stenwold . . . they’re never going to forgive me.’ The man’s pudgy hands were shaking, rattling the Speaker’s seal and the reservoir pen.

‘Then let me,’ Stenwold decided. ‘I’m used to the city thinking ill of me. Now that everyone agrees with me, I don’t know where to put myself.’ He managed tp
raise the ghost of a smile, but Jodry merely shook his head.

‘It must be
me
,’ the Speaker said, ‘because it must be obeyed. If we cannot have a full decision of the Assembly – and we can’t, I know – then I must
put my hand to it.’

‘Then do it. And then I’ll sign it, too. All the authority we can provide, and the blame can be shared. I’ll say I forced you to it, if you want.’

‘What will I say to them, Stenwold? The relatives, the homeless. I never thought of this happening, when I put my name forward in the Lots. I never thought that I’d be responsible
for . . . that I’d fail them and do so knowingly, eyes open. I thought it would all be trade disputes and paperwork.’

‘You’re doing well,’ Stenwold told him solemnly. ‘Better than I’d have thought. But I wouldn’t ask this of you, if it wasn’t needed.’

Jodry nodded tiredly. ‘Banjacs is ready?’

‘He will be by tomorrow night.’

The fat man looked up at him, horrified. ‘He says that? He’d
better
be ready. I’ve written him an open pass to the cursed Assembly
Treasury
to get his bloody
machine working. If he pisses away the chance we’re buying him – at such cost! – I’ll strangle the old bastard myself!’ A deep breath. ‘And their
agents?’

‘Those that I have identified have been passed the story, by the most indirect channels I could devise. Word should already be heading for the Second, regarding our problems, our
weaknesses. And tonight will bear that word out.’

‘Will it? And we’re gambling on what you think they’ll think? Why not, given all the other things we’re throwing the dice on? Why not, indeed?’

Stenwold regarded at him without any words of comfort or consolation – and he sensed that Jodry did not want to be comforted, did not believe that he deserved it. They were about a
terrible business, a betrayal of their own for reasons of brutal pragmatism, and both of them felt the brand of it burning their skin.

Jodry took the seal, clicked at the top until it welled with red wax, and then stamped it down hard. A shudder went through him, but he took up the pen and signed boldly, with hardly a quiver,
before moving on to the next document. Stenwold took out his own pen and added his name to each in turn, the Speaker and the War Master – as much weight as they could give to their
conspiracy.